MAM

Anchor’s corporate and legal identity also changed

10 Apr, 2019 - 07:52 PM IST | By Mansi Sharma

MUMBAI: Japanese electronics major Panasonic has announced that it will substantially increase its marketing spends, for its consumer electrical products subsidiary ‘Panasonic Life Solutions India Private Limited’, to Rs. 150 crore this fiscal.

This was revealed by Panasonic Life Solutions India Private Limited managing director Vivek Sharma during a press conference announcing the change in the corporate and legal identity of Panasonic’s wholly owned subsidiary ‘Anchor’ on Wednesday.

Speaking at the event, Sharma noted that Panasonic Life Solutions has recorded an impressive 3x growth in the past two years. The senior executive is positive about the new government post-election fueling growth of the consumer electrical products segment, as schemes like GST already has. More investment in the advertising and marketing spheres will thus help the brand in leveraging these opportunities by connecting better with the consumers.

Speaking about his plans to utilise the increased marketing budgets, Panasonic Life Solutions India Private Limited (earlier Anchor Electricals Pvt. Ltd.) vice president Sunil Narula told Indiantelevision.com that the brand has already been focussing on improving its consumer connect for the past 18 months and intends to do more of the same going forward.

He said, “Majority of our ad-spends will now be looking at improving the consumer connect, which means there will be a lot of spending in the mass media. At the same time, we will maintain our connection with the influencers—the electricians, architects, and consultants. We already have about more than 35,000 electricians on our digital platform where we engage with them and motivate them. This helps us in staying on the top of their minds.”

Elaborating more on the ad-expenditures, Narula pointed out that there is going to be a dramatic increase in their digital spends.

“Television is obviously going to be the lead medium. A good amount from our ad-spends, i.e., 65-70 per cent, would go to TV. It will be followed by OOH, which will take about 7-8 per cent of our total budgets. Then we have the radio at 4-5 per cent. Digital is something that we started (only) a year back and we are spending 3-4 per cent of our overall marketing money on it. This is going to increase dramatically over the next couple of years. We might take it to 7-8 per cent and even further as we have seen that digital is helping us a lot in increasing the brand connect with the consumers,” he said.

On being asked whether increased ad spends on digital would mean a deduction from TV, Narula replied in negative. He asserted, “No, we are not cutting spends from TV to invest more in digital because, fortunately, we are increasing our ad-spends every year. There is a constant effort to pump in a good amount of money to ensure that our visibility is high in the market place. To cite an example, we had spent 70 per cent more on advertising last year as compared to the fiscal prior to that.”

After a decade of being acquired by Japanese electronic products company Panasonic, Anchor Electricals Pvt. Ltd. has announced the change in its legal entity to ‘Panasonic Life Solutions India Private Limited’, with effect from 1 April 2019. The corporate identity, ‘Anchor by Panasonic’, has been changed to ‘Panasonic’.

The identity, however, will not affect the market positioning of both the brands. As shared by Sharma and Narula, this change is more about legal and corporate matters. The two brands will co-exist in the market.

“Anchor as a brand would target the value for money consumers, which has been the fact in the last five decades as well, and Panasonic as a brand will target the premium consumers. While we are also moving up the ladder when it comes to anchor brand and trying to occupy space between value for money and premium,” Narula added.